The rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses fundamental challenges for the creative industry. Although AI technologies are being adopted at an ever faster pace, Design as an academic discipline has so far failed to provide a convincing answer to the opportunities and challenges of AI.

This one-day symposium brings together design researchers and educators from the TU Delft Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering with the aim of sharing experiences and shaping future activities at the intersection of Design and AI.

IBM worked with Rio to design a command center that integrates over 30 city departments to improve emergency response management and collaboration across the city. Weather forecasting and predictive analytics capabilities use information to decide how to best react to current events and how to best plan for what is likely to happen in the future in order to minimize impact on citizens.

My own contribution focuses on the social consequences of AI in the context of smart city design. Here’s the abstract:

From opacity to legibility: AI in the smart city

In this short talk I discuss design responses to the potential implications of AI – an integral element of the smart city suite of technologies – for public involvement in urban design. My concern, as implied in the title, is that AI constitutes a ‘black box’ whose opacity may prevent the public from taking a more informed and active role in city-making.

I will first situate AI in relation to two important orientations, directions or ‘pulls’ in smart city design: the first is the imperative to design flexible, multi-stakeholder, open-ended platforms (“infrastructuring” in Ezio Manzini’s terms), and the second is the growing shift in ownership of urban infrastructure from public to private actors (what Keller Easterling calls “extrastatecraft”). I will suggest that it is becoming difficult for the public to identify the presence of AI and intervene in its development given the way much of the former takes place ‘under the hood’, so to speak, and much of the latter takes place in exclusive commercial settings. I will then illustrate two design responses to these developments. The first, Smart City Panorama by Studio Richard Vijgen, is an art-design installation that was part of the Data Embassy exhibition during Dutch Design Week, 2017. The second is the AI Mayor, a speculative design created by students during last year’s edition of the DfI masters class, Interactive Technology Design (ITD).

Interactive Technology Design (ITD) is a masters-level course that is offered as part of the DfI (design for interactions) MSc program at Delft University of Technology‘s Department of Industrial Design. The course introduces students to explorative prototyping as a “make first” approach to design, promoting the use of prototyping not just as a way to evaluate final concepts but as a way to come up with and flesh out those concepts.

In 2017 the course was dedicated to critical, speculative futures. Students were assigned one of seven themes (each conveying a societal issue with important future consequences), and were asked to design an interactive experience that communicates critically a possible future based on those themes. Instead of solving a problem, students were asked to communicate the problem. In the course syllabus we write:

Good prototypes will both be recognizable as belonging to these speculative worlds, and be capable of communicating elements of that world in a critical manner – using future developments as a way to problematize the present.

The design process combined futuring techniques with rapid prototyping, providing students with a playful, experimental environment in which they could be both creative and critical. In each class day (~9 hrs) student groups were asked to complete a full prototyping cycle: develop a future scenario, design and materialize an interactive prototype that communicates the scenario, and test the prototype with ‘real’ users.

The overall process included several steps:

Developing familiarity with the theme/brief, including desk research and guest lectures from within and outside the department.

Creating a two-driver scenario (resulting in a 2×2 scenario space) that takes place in the near(ish) future (20-30 years ahead).

Developing a narrative that conveys one of the four scenario possibilities as an everyday situation, and identifying an interactive object within that story.

Designing, building, and testing the interactive object.

Reflecting on the day’s process in a short report.

The courses’s final exhibition featured 20 group projects. Each group was given a dedicated space, where students and visitors role-played the future situation using costumes, props, and additional media such as videos and music. Vice’s Motherboard reported on the exhibition here (in Dutch).

The AI MayorWhat if decisions about urban development were made by Artificial Intelligence?
The interactive experience played out as a faux public consultation: participant were asked to help the ‘mayor’ make a decision, only to find that the ‘mayor’ went ahead and made whatever decision he desired. The “blackbox” of urban design was seen for all of its opacity.

Lonely Astronaut TrainingWhat if astronauts going on long solo missions had to receive special training for the loneliness such missions imply?
The experience included proximity detractors, sound and vibration messaging that went off whenever the astronaut/participant came into close contact with others. Loneliness became a teachable emotion.

The DatactorWhat if it became practically impossible to assert the authenticity of consumer products?
Participants wore special gloves that upon contact with a product showed some relevant information about it. When several participants look at the same product the glove shows different, contrasting information. ‘Fake’ product information became a reality.

The Republic of TiraniaWhat if refugees seeking asylum had to undergo genetic modification as a condition for being granted entrance?
Participants underwent scanning and simulated genetic modification in a small booth, after which they were given a fake passport in which white skin was turned dark and vice versa.

Data AfterlifeWhat if our data became a living epitaph after our death?
By using a special device, participants could listen to the data traces of the dead. The device triggered voice playback once it came into proximity with a burial wall. Participants were also asked whether they would be willing to leave, posthumously, their data memories behind.

We report on preliminary results from a public engagement project based on a procedural approach to sustainability. The project centered on an interactive art installation that comprised a live actor, an immersive soundscape featuring a handful of different characters, an interactive touch-table, and four interactive rooms within which participants wandered, partially guided by a narrative through-line, yet at the same time left to make sense of any larger meanings on their own. The installation was designed to experiment with two propositions: (1) that there is value in public engagement with sustainability based on the exploration and articulation of deeply held beliefs about the world—the worldviews, values, and presuppositions that mediate perception and action; (2) that there is value in replacing the infocentric tendency of most public engagement on sustainability with an approach premised in aesthetics and experiential resonance. Following the installation’s two-week pilot run, our preliminary results indicated that the majority of participants found the experience both resonant and thought provoking, and were mostly willing to critically engage with their pre- existing notions of sustainability.

The full article is available online here. You can find a list of my publications here.

Call for Papers, Workshops and Posters

The ICT4S conferences bring together leading researchers in ICT for Sustainability with government and industry representatives, including decision-makers with an interest in using ICT for sustainability, researchers focusing on ICT effects on sustainability and developers of sustainable ICT systems or applications.

Theme and Topics

The theme of the 2018 conference is “Thriving Communities”. The transformational power of ICT is essential to put our society on the path to sustainability. This potential could embrace all levels, from individuals to communities, from public sector to all industry sectors, from business goals to social aspirations and environmental objectives. ICT can bring people together to build thriving, resilient communities. Papers relating to ICT for sustainability in a broad sense and papers developing this year’s theme (and beyond) are welcome. Instructions for all types of submissions can also be found at the conference website.

Conference topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

Sustainable community building via ICT

Grassroots movements facilitated by ICT

Resilience by ICT

Social sustainability implications, contributions and limitations of ICT

Enabling and systemic effects of ICT on society and/or the environment

Smart cities, homes and offices

Intelligent energy management in buildings

Smart grids

Sustainability in data centers and high-performance computing

Intelligent transportation and logistics

Green networking, monitoring and adaptation of software-intensive systems and services

ICT-induced behavioral and societal change

Design principles for sustainable ICT

Energy-efficient and energy-aware software engineering

Sustainability of technical infrastructures

Software for environmental sustainable ICT

Software for sustainable business governance

Reduced hardware obsolescence

E-waste and closed material cycles

Incentives for more sustainable ICT

Tools supporting green decision making and development

Challenges for an environmentally sustainable ICT industry

Education in ICT for sustainability

Systematic interdisciplinary efforts in ICT for sustainability

Workshops

We invite workshop proposals of traditional or unconventional formats for half-day or full-day workshops. Workshops will be held on Monday, May 14, and Friday, May 18, 2018.

ICT4S’18 workshops will facilitate the exchange of new ideas in all areas related to sustainability and technology research and practice. A variety of formats can be considered, ranging from traditional research paper presentations to extremely interactive and participatory sessions. We particularly invite proposals that cover controversial viewpoints, emerging technology drivers or transformative ideas aimed at changing basic assumptions.

Details of what should be addressed in the proposal and a more detailed description of the submission process will be posted on the website soon.

Papers

We welcome original papers and posters reporting on research, development, case studies, and experience reports in the field of ICT4S.

All papers must conform, at time of submission, to the IEEE Formatting Guidelines, and limited to at most 6,500 words, and 10 pages including text, appendices, figures and references. The current Word template and LaTeX files will be linked on the website soon.

There will be an open access publication for the conference indexed by all major data bases.

Journals First Track

We invite authors of recently published journals papers to present their work at ICT4S. Journals First papers should relate to ICT4S and describe original and previously unpublished results that significantly extend (or were not previously reported in) prior work. Papers that are extensions of previous conference papers, or which are minor enhancements or variants of the results presented in the prior work are not eligible.

Accepted for publication after May 15, 2016 and before November 15, 2017.

If you would like us to consider a paper published in another journal of equal reputation to those presented in the list on our website, please contact the Program Chair.

Posters

We invite submissions of high-quality extended abstracts for posters. Posters may present late-breaking research or work in progress. A poster can help attract interest and give a rapid overview of what your research is all about. At the conference, the work described in the extended abstract will be presented as a poster, ideally in interactive discussion with the audience. We especially welcome posters that describe proposed empirical studies. An attachment with a maximum of 2 additional pages must be included in the submission. The attachment must clearly state how the work described in the extended abstract is to be presented at the conference, emphasizing interaction potential and explaining how an engaging participant experience will be achieved. More details will be available on the website soon.

For a few weeks during November and December 2016, commuters exiting Rotterdam’s striking central station encountered a series of billboards situated along Kruisplein – the plaza that leads from the station southward toward the river Maas. The billboards depicted 12 alternative visions of a future Rotterdam. They were commissioned by the New Institute (Het Nieuwe Instituut) and were created by local designers.

(The billboards along Kruisplein)

Creating imaginary urban futures for public consumption is not new. New York’s World Fair of 1939-40, for instance, featured not one but two futuristic cities called Democracity and Futurama (I’ve written about the Fair here). More recently, the Museum of Vancouver, in collaboration with Urbanarium, held a similar exhibition from January to May, 2016, titled Your Future Home. While the Vancouver exhibition addressed fairly technical categories of urban design (residential density, public space, transportation and housing affordability), the visions located outside Rotterdam’s central station engaged with a mishmash of technical and aspirational categories such as inclusivity, new technology, sustainable prosperity, innovation, mobility, bottom-up, quality of life, circular city, vacant buildings, densification, energy transition and urban streets. Both exhibitions, however, were created by professional designers and architects, and were meant to stir discussion about urban design.

The exhibition came in response to a specific policy proposal: Woonvisie 2030. The controversial proposal sought to reduce the city’s stock of low-cost housing units by 20,000 and replace them with 16,000 higher-end units. Citizen groups that opposed the proposal forced the city to hold an advisory referendum on November 30, hoping that it would compel the city to re-evaluate the proposal and galvanize a strong opposition to what they saw as yet another act of gentrification in a city that lost close to 30,000 low-cost units since 2000. Alas, their plan failed. While opposition to the policy won a majority in the referendum (72.5%), turnout (16.9%) was lower than the minimum required to validate the referendum (30%). As consequence the policy could be green-lighted without further input from the public.

As the exhibition’s curators state, the 12 visions sought to expand and add nuance to the debate on the proposal.

The exhibition does not seek to provide advice on whether to vote for or against the City of Rotterdam’s urban development vision, but aims to challenge the city’s residents to think about how they want to live in the city fifteen years from now and thereafter. Alongside statistics and policy resolutions, it is important that designers’ visions are also part of the debate about something as important as the city’s future, especially in a city with such a rich tradition of experimental urban design. (source)

Looking at the different visions I was struck by several features. First, five of the twelve were driven by technological innovation. Take for instance this vision by Spark Design & Innovation:

Not only does this vision address the theme of mobility through a single technological driver (the electric car), but it also seems much too close to the present to actually evoke a radically different way to imagine the city. Further, while it adopts a narrative that reflects the Dutch values of autonomy and self-sufficiency (according to which electric cars can be seen as the next step in the evolution of bicycles), it neglects other important Dutch values such as efficiency and collectivity (contra Hofstede’s cultural indicators!). Shouldn’t a future Rotterdam seek to correct the mistakes made by its post-war designers and reject the prominence of cars in urban design?

Innovations in mobility drove several other visions such as De Straten (‘The Streets’) by Maxwan Architects + Urbanists (to which I return below), and Skycar City from MVRDV:

The coming decades will radically alter the city: a new kind of metropolis will be born, without roads and without traffic lights. We will park in the sky! The city will become truly three-dimensional! The city will liberate itself from the ground. Urban density will be lifted to a higher level. Welcome to Rotterdam, Skycar City!

But what would such ‘liberation from the ground’ mean for pedestrians? Will there even be pedestrians?

A different techno-utopian future was featured in a vision by Atalier van Lieshout. Here, the city will transcend the (perceived) tradeoff between sustainability and material prosperity and become both by building an underground nuclear reactor that will power all of the Netherlands. The generated wealth, oddly, will then be used to collectivize the harbour, making everyone even richer. But will this reversal of neoliberal economics produce rich individuals or a rich collective? It isn’t clear. It also isn’t clear how happy Rotterdammers will be living on top of a nuclear reactor.

A second striking feature of the visions presented in the exhibition was the degree to which they were relatively pragmatic. Only a few of the visions were flashy and provocative, while the rest seemed fairly levelheaded, practical and, well, Dutch.

Take for instance The Stairwell from ZUS, in which Rotterdam’s empty offices can be turned into housing units by the simple addition of external staircases and useable facades to existing commercial buildings.

The ultimate Rotterdam street is a lively urban street with a mix of living and working and a diverse range of housing, with pavements, trees and the promise of a river. The street and the buildings are raised above the highest flood line. The Maas whispers.

The Happy Street depicted in the vision (and which gives it its name) looks like it could exist anywhere, the only sign of locality is the crane in the background, evidence of the street’s proximity to the port. Nonetheless, this vision integrates an important environmental factor: the street is located above the Maas’s highest flood line (although it’s unclear whether this vision already takes into account the anticipated impact of climate change on the regions waterways). What looks like the standard mixed-use street so popular with current urban designers is set in relation to the river’s natural ebb and flow, albeit, happily floating above the river’s pulse, almost oblivious to the flows that underlie it. “The Maas whispers”, but can the residents of Happy Street hear it?

Much like the previous visions, the one by &RANJ Serious Games assumes that an already existing technology holds the key for a new urban epoch. In this sense, it merely projects the present onto the future.

In the digital city of 2030, physical reality and virtual reality will be fused into a fantastic hyperreality. The city makes room for our imagination: it is no longer bound to the laws of time and physics but can take on all manner of forms. The city is tailored to each individual. It is a playground, a game in which the inhabitants can have unique, meaningful experiences and in which they can make, break and repair the rules.

Turning the city into a playground for its citizens’ imagination strikes me as a very appealing proposition, but the vision is eerily similar to the dystopian world imagined in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. Wouldn’t such a gamified, customizable, blended reality end up producing a hyper-individuated experience of the city, one that is antithetical to the kind of urban sociality so many citizens crave? Must we be ‘alone together’ in the city of the future?

As Martijn de Waal argues in The City as Interface (2014), with their emphasis on efficient, customizable experiences, such technological visions conjure a libertarian ideal of urban citizenship according to which city dwellers are approached foremostly as individual consumers. They may be free to “organize life according to their own insights”, but as consequence reduce their involvement and solidarity with others.

As these visions make clear, the arrival of new technologies is expected to create new relationships between city dwellers. But it can also redraw the relations between urban forms and the natural environment – the interfaces between the artifactual and the natural. Take for instance the vision offered by Maxwan Architects + Urbanists I briefly mentioned above:

In a clever homage to the very space in which the billboards stand (the premise of the city’s old zoo, the traces of which can still be found in proximate street names such as Diergaardesingel (‘zoolane’)), the vision features a green city centre made possible “when in a certain sense the car got its own brain”. Nature, in this vision, is invited back into the heart of the city once the car is no longer king in Rotterdam, albeit, it remains visibly and neatly confined. In a sense, nature becomes a complement of the “silent, elegant, almost invisible” characteristic of future cars; more of a trace of the nonpresence of automobiles than an entity in and of its own.

Nature plays a more central role in what are perhaps the two most provocative visions in the exhibition. In Felixx Landscape Architects & Planners‘s vision, the abundance of free renewable energy enables the transformation of the Kralingen Plas (lake) into a phantasmagoric pleasure dome, complete with both snowy and tropical landscapes. Ski-lifts and flamingos co-exist; Jevons’s Paradox be damned!

In this vision nature becomes the material out of which human pleasure and decadence are manufactured. It’s an artificial nature, nature sans nature. It signals the completion of the modernist project – the substitution of nature by manmade objects – the logical conclusion of the Dutch experiment in conquering nature.

In the second vision, Resillience by De Urbanisten, the city is visibly in the process of returning to its original, swampy origins. Monkeys, birds and humans share the re-wilded urban landscape as a sign of co-existence.

We live in a delta
In a city of ebb and flow,
Of to and fro,
Of give and take,
Everyone is welcome.

We do our dreaming together,
In a wonderful bath,
Fed by the warmth of the city.

Rotterdam is complete
Nothing is lost.
Whatever remains
Is a wellspring for the new.

Nature, in this vision, becomes a marker of a new hybrid urban form. A true symbol of a different urban experience – one in which nature is allowed to breech its confinements in neatly drawn canals, fields and parks. Not a remnant to discard nor a remainder to cherish, but an equal urban force whose presence is as significant as that of the built environment in the background. Without it, something is lost. With it “Rotterdam is complete”.

In this sense, this last vision represents not only a new relation between the city and the river that gives it its pulse and livelihood, but echoes the spirit of those anonymous Mai ’68 sloganeers: if we stop trying to repress them, the presence of already existing urban realities can be liberating and transformative. Under the cobblestones, the Maas.

* with thanks to Jotte de Koning for help with translation and to Emma Puerari for sharing a chilly winter’s excursion to the exhibition.